/lit/ - Literature

>>5805253
>I find extremities saying that Europe would not have existed without Islam and the Arabic world
In terms of numbers and writing systems, Sumerian -> Semitic -> Greek -> Roman -> German. This was long before Islam.

>and that Europeans never traded until the Islamic world finally reached them.
There was trade between Europe and the middle east during Greek and Roman times, but it was through the Ottomans that much of the trade routes to East Asia were established

>Then I see the other side which says that the Islamic world was basically the invader and made the world shitty
Europe was already shitty and feudalistic before Islam, and Iberia was never not shitty. The Jews, at least, experienced their "Golden Age" in Muslim Spain

> I know that the Islamic nation was the aggressor in terms of the Crusades what with the conquests of Jerusalem and all of that
There were multiple crusades, most of them unrelated to Islam. They were a stupid meme that kings invoked whenever they wanted to distract their armies, and half the time Jerusalem wasn't even under muslim control. Some "crusades" were nothing more than taking a ship to visit Jerusalem and getting blessed while murdering heathens on the way there and back.

>>5805294
I think trade with the Far East was more of a Mongol thing than an Ottoman thing.

>>5805253
During the Christian Dark Ages most books were burnt, but the monks of Nestor travelled east with their own literary collection of essentials and introduced the Islamic world to traditional philosophy

This led to great thinkers like Ibn Rushd (AKA Averroes who is the only reason we have our contemporary notion of causality), al-Ash'ari (who had an atomic conception of space and time in the 9th fucking century) and the likes of Al-Ghazali and Ibn Sina who are the only reason the western world even knows about Hellenist philosophy and without whom people like St Thomas Aquinas and Descartes wouldn't even exist

tl;dr Islamic philosophers and intellectuals are the only reason the western world as we know it even exists

Not sure that I'll be precisely what you're looking for but The Walking Drum is an historical fiction novel taking place in the 12th century and following a man's journey from Brittany through Europe and the Middle East to find/rescue his father. It touches on a lot of important ideas/books/people from early Islam. If nothing else it is a relatively well-written, entertaining read, somewhat similar in its narrative to The Count of Monte Cristo.

>>5805253
The height of trade between Europe and the Middle East came late in the twentieth century, when one m00t imported an Iranian goat milk manufacturer into Silicon Valley, thus sparking the cultural revolution that is the twenty first century.

>>5805322
Here comes to reactionary horde ready to exclaim that the mozelsm din do nuffin muh twin towas.

"europe wouldn't exist without Islam" doesn't sound too wrong
Charlemagne was basically the founder of Europe, and he gained his power as the son of a line of men who fought of muslims

>>5805322
>Christian dark ages
ALLAHU AKHBAR, comrade. *tips gender neutral fedora*

For clarification, anyone have good books/articles/anykindofsources in relation to the matter? Just looking for some nice, historically accurate, preferably unbiased (if that is even possible) reads

>>5805452
I'm not actually very smart or educated at all, but double chan has a /his/ board and there's usually a historian on there at least once a day that knows what he's talking about

There are fuckloads of history books about Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages, on a billion different levels and topics, because it's a trendy issue these days. You gotta be more specific.

To put it simply though, Western Europe was an economically and culturally collapsed backwater. It had gradually feudalised and cities had gradually shrunk over the later Roman period, until finally you reach a point where the Mediterranean region has a handful of underpopulated cities left (most of which don't become really visible in history again for 500+ years) but all the old Roman megacities of Northern Europe are basically housing a church and a few squatters. And places like Britain completely even lapse completely into pre-Roman barbarism. Gold currency stopped being used and specie in general flowed out of Europe because it wasn't really producing anything on a large enough scale for trade, except capturing 'European' slaves and selling them primarily to the Islamic world (and that was mostly dominated by the Vikings, who were attacking 'Europe' as well). To paraphrase Pirenne and others, Europe converted to a 'closed system' economy, where each villa or feudal unit attempted to subsist on its own resources, trading minimally during surpluses or shortfalls, and even the 'great' markets were probably not too economically important.

By contrast, Islam, like Byzantium, basically inherited the old Roman world without nearly as much decline (at least beyond late Roman levels). They were an urban civilisation with massive cities and a flourishing literary culture and all that. Straight continuity and recovery from the later Roman period, no collapse like the West. During this period Western Europe was an economic and cultural backwater, by comparison. The Islamic world thought very little of Frankish kingdoms, aside from sporadic (and famous) contacts e.g. between Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid, because there simply wasn't much interaction.

The Islamic invasions of Spain were part of the original expansive energies of the Arab diaspora, picking up the North African Berbers along the way, and spilling across the straits. It was a natural movement of expansion and conquest, and not some gigantic, dramatic war of religion. It was undertaken by brilliant generals and really good troops, and they conquered as far as they could in the decadent late Roman / early Medieval Visigothic kingdom, which wasn't all that hard. They fought Charles Martel at Poitiers and you can Wikipedia that to see the arguments for its significance or lack thereof. Islamic civilisation in the Iberian peninsula was a high civilisation and really celebrated by moderns. Easy to Wikipedia, al-Andalus.

>>5805511
As for subsequent Christian-Muslim relations, Pirenne quotes ibn Khaldun in saying that the Western Christians 'couldn't float a plank' on the Mediterranean, and his idea is basically that there was very little commerce between the two worlds, while previously the Mediterranean had been an enormous conduit of nonstop commerce (cultural and economic) in Roman times. There are softer views on this, especially for very low-level stuff and as regards al-Andalus, but basically it holds true until the tenth or eleventh centuries. There just wasn't much going on that we can talk about, let alone look at in detail. The Muslims continued being nuisances, occupying the Byzantine holdings in Sicily and southern Italy, even establishing raiding bases within France for decades once or twice, but there is no great fervour for 'crusade' or anything like it for hundreds of years after this.

The belief that Islam saved or enriched the Christian world is a bit like the idea that the Irish saved civilisation. It has merits but it's very often overblown for nationalist reasons. The Islamic world (and Byzantium) kept right on talking about classical texts, learning Greek and Latin, developing new philosophical systems, etc., while Europe was degenerating into illiteracy, and even churchmen were writing and reading less and less (in the Dark Ages, at least). Byzantium has its moments but mostly declines into curating its classical heritage rather than developing it. Islamic philosophy on the other hand was huge, as was Islamic science and medicine. It's no exaggeration to say that Islam was having a first rate literary, philosophical, and scientific golden age while Europe floundering, especially after the collapse of the centralised caliphates and the rise of 'Medieval Islam' after the 9th century. The most famous influence on the West was Islamic Aristotelianism. The Christian scholastics (Wikipedia it), a very important theological and philosophical movement, famously praised famous Islamic commentaries on Aristotle as the best around. But honestly, from a scholarly perspective, the influence of Islam as a cultural inspiration (let alone an economic resuscitator) is basically never discussed. European economic and cultural recovery are obviously complex, but mostly treated as in-house phenomena. Aside from being a massive slave market for a good while, the Islamic world had very little impact at least on the standard scholarly model of European economic recovery from the 11th century onward, and it was waning in several respects right as Europe hit its own stride.

>>5805512
The Crusades are fantastically fucking complex and controversial as a subject. There was no 'Islamic nation'. The holy places had been held by Islam for centuries. There is no evidence that the West or even Byzantium saw this as a particular outrage. Even when Byzantine emperors in the 10th century captured parts of Palestine and used the language of holy war, they didn't care too much about what we would consider a 'crusade'. To them it was a war of conquest like any other, e.g. to secure parts of Anatolia. The conventional view (again, very controversial subject) is basically that the crusades result from a combination of:
a) Byzantine requests for military aid in the wake of Manzikert and the general Seljuk ass-fucking they had just received,
b) new Western European expansiveness and outward-looking, e.g. with the Italians recapturing their islands and raiding North Africa in the 11th after centuries of doing fuckall while Muslim pirates raided them every weekend, or the Reconquista just starting in Iberia,
c) various European expansive forces and economic recovery (VERY COMPLEX AND CONTROVERSIAL SUBJECT, maybe see Bartlett, 'The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350'),
d) greater European interest in pilgrimage and the holy places,
e) an activist, reformist (Gregorian) papacy asserting itself,
f) a related rising tendency to see 'Christendom' or 'Latin Christendom' as a corporate commonwealth with vested interests despite multiple monarchic heads (including the Pope), and
g) an increased concern with uniformity, again related to the reformist papacy and united 'Christian commonwealth' thing (this mostly relates to the crusades against internal heresy/disobedience to the pope).

Probably Urban II didn't know all that well what he was doing and didn't expect nearly the response that he got. Again, the issue of why the First Crusade exploded like it did is extremely controversial and there are dozens of 'state of the debate' books you could read. But it basically achieved such success militarily because the Seljuk state was in disarray. Subsequent popes gradually developed the idea of crusade as an institution, and that's when you start getting real concerted and probably sincere notions of 'fuck Islam, fuck the heathen!'. But this is in reaction to initial success, and even more importantly to subsequent losses - it didn't drive the Crusade to begin with.

>>5805515
Islam wasn't an 'invader', or a magical wonderland of enlightenment that saved Europe. It was a confident, expansive, urban civilisation following Greco-Roman, Persian, and general Near Eastern traditions unbroken for millennia. It was culturally Perso-Islamic, but intellectually syncretic and appreciative of its Greco-Roman and even Christian elements. It was not terribly inclined to trade in the West (which produced nothing of value for a very long time), and was much more focused inward, or on Byzantium, than on Francia or Italy. Raids in the latter were undertaken by petty dynasts local enough to understand the value of seizing Sicily, not because of great religious wars. The golden age of al-Andalus was a splinter dynasty of the Umayyads after the Abbasids ran them out of town, not a colonial outpost for attacking France. Even the initial invasions of Iberia were simply carried with the same energy that slammed the Umayyads into the Tang dynasty or against Constantinople fifteen times, before they settled down to write adab poetry and draw concentric squiggles for centuries, like most civilisations with initial explosive periods do.

Conversely, Europe cared very little about Islam prior to the High Middle Ages. Those raiders' nests were often allied with Frankish lords who simply didn't see themselves as that united Christian world yet. That idea would come much later, being basically unconscious prior to the First Crusade and then articulated after it, and it gets very complex as it entwines with ideals of chivalry and yadda yadda. Bartlett (mentioned above) uses the example of Norman expansion in Ireland to demonstrate how the expansionary forces worked. These were fellow Christians but they were cast as 'errant' when necessary, to justify conquests, because they were a natural target of expansion for a weaponised Norman-Frankish aristocracy with a toolkit of feudal norms that were ideal for conquest and colonising. Same thing they did to Islams, or Baltic pagans, etc.

>>5805525
tldr; Islam gave way less of a fuck about 'Western Christendom' than people think, Islam was not a huge influence on Europe economically or culturally and was not even really intellectually plumbed by Western Euros until the Renaissance and afterward, Christian expansionary forces were indigenous phenomena (with a billion trillion books about them), and the Crusades were (to quote Housley or Tyerman from memory) a reflection, articulation, and later an intensifier of those forces, rather than a simple creator of them.

As for book recommendations, look up Jonathan Riley-Smith (What Were the Crusades? is like 80 pages and famous, also about ten other major books), Christopher Tyerman (particularly The Invention of the Crusades), and Norman Housley (particularly Contesting the Crusades), which will cover at least the bulk of your question, since debunking simple Christian-Muslim rivalry as a major causative factor is a preliminary to any discussion. Also have very good topical bibliographies that can direct you to more info, e.g. on the Islamic interpretation of and reaction to the Crusades.

>>5805511
>>5805512
>>5805515
>>5805525
>>5805528
Well then, I'll be on my way to pick those up soon as I can, thank you, kind, based anon, you're knowledge is appreciated

>>5805322
>the monks of Nestor travelled east with their own literary collection of essentials and introduced the Islamic world to traditional philosophy

This is a simplification, there were Nestorians involved but just as important were the Syriac Orthodox scholars and the Arabic translators in Baghdad. The idea that 'most books' were burnt in the 'Christian Dark Ages' is nonsense.

if it weren't for islam maintaining the grecco-roman tradition while europe fell apart and started playing with its own poop, the renaissance would never have happened. we have muslims to thank for preserving the greek texts. in fact we have them to thank for a lot of things that they don't get enough credit for.

>>5805511
>>5805512
>>5805515
>>5805525
>>5805528

>>5805793
This. Quality posting.

Anyone know if the crusades through arab eyes is any good?